Interwar Britain Research Articles

'Saving the lives of our dogs': the development of canine distemper vaccine in interwar Britain.

This paper examines the successful campaign in Britain to develop canine distemper vaccine between 1922 and 1933. The campaign mobilized disparate groups around the common cause of using modern science to save the nation's dogs from a deadly disease. Spearheaded by landed patricians associated with the country journal The Field, and funded by dog owners and associations, it relied on collaborations with veterinary professionals, government scientists, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the commercial pharmaceutical house the Burroughs Wellcome Company (BWC). The social organization of the campaign reveals a number of important, yet previously unexplored, features of interwar science and medicine in Britain. It depended on a patronage system that drew upon a large base of influential benefactors and public subscriptions. Coordinated by the Field Distemper Fund, this system was characterized by close relationships between landed elites and their social networks with senior science administrators and researchers. Relations between experts and non-experts were crucial, with high levels of public engagement in all aspects of research and vaccine development. At the same time, experimental and commercial research supported under the campaign saw dynamic interactions between animal and human medicine, which shaped the organization of the MRC's research programme and demonstrated the value of close collaboration between veterinary and medical science, with the dog as a shared object and resource. Finally, the campaign made possible the translation of 'laboratory' findings into field conditions and commercial products. Rather than a unidirectional process, translation involved negotiations over the very boundaries of the 'laboratory' and the 'field', and what constituted a viable vaccine. This paper suggests that historians reconsider standard historical accounts of the nature of patronage, the role of animals, and the interests of landed elites in interwar British science and medicine.

Making modern love: sexual narratives and identities in interwar Britain

Introduction: Narratives and Identity 1. Naughty Stories 2. Reading Married Love 3. Fashioning Fetishism from the Pages of London Life 4. Mr. Hyde and the Cross-Dressing Kink 5.Whipping in the Pages of the PRO Conclusion

Love in a Cold Climate: Letters, Public Opinion and Monarchy in the 1936 Abdication Crisis

To what extent did the abdication of Edward VIII represent a significant turning point both in the history of constitutional monarchy and in the relationship between public and private morality in inter-war Britain? Letters written to the King and to other key players in the affair provide evidence of the disputed nature of media-influenced public opinion during the 1930s. But it is also argued that this correspondence points to the psychologically expansive and emotionally expressive nature of contemporary opinion formation, as it was experienced in the context of a major crisis of national self-confidence that centred on the behaviour of the sovereign. The letters reveal how the abdication became a catalyst for the expression of heavily gendered anxieties about the connection between private life and political responsibility and about the claims of personal relationships on domestic and imperial affairs. Despite the immediate closure to events provided by the King's departure, it is emphasized that these remained unresolved tensions, which were part of a wider cultural conflict between contemporary values and an established ethical code that governed the monarchy and high politics.

Commodifying the Self Within: Ghosts, Libels, and the Crook Life Story in Interwar Britain

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommodifying the Self Within: Ghosts, Libels, and the Crook Life Story in Interwar Britain*Matt HoulbrookMatt HoulbrookMagdalen College, University of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 85, Number 2June 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/669735 Views: 312Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Peter M. Scott The Booster, the Snitch, and the Bogus False Arrest Victim: Retailers and Shoplifters in Interwar America and Britain, Enterprise & Society 46 (Jun 2021): 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2021.26Caroline Shaw Freedom of expression and the palladium of British liberties, 1650–2000: A review essay, History Compass 18, no.1111 (Oct 2020).https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12629Charlotte Wildman Miss Moriarty, the Adventuress and the Crime Queen: The Rise of the Modern Female Criminal in Britain, 1918–1939, Contemporary British History 30, no.11 (Sep 2015): 73–98.https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2015.1055254Heather Shore Introduction, (Jan 2015): 1–24.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313911_1John Carter Wood, Paul Knepper Crime Stories, Media History 20, no.44 (Sep 2014): 345–351.https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2014.949409John Carter Wood The Constables and the ‘Garage Girl’, Media History 20, no.44 (Aug 2014): 384–399.https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2014.949421

All-in Wrestling in Inter-War Britain: Science and Spectacle in Mass Observation's ‘Worktown’

All-in wrestling was established as a spectator sport in the 1930s and appealed primarily to a working-class audience. All-in was controversial because of its excessive violence and its blend of the spectacular and dramatic with sport, which led to accusations that it was not really a sport. Nevertheless, it retained many characteristics of sport, and audiences consumed it as such. All-in wrestling was an outcome of the evolution of a traditional ancient sport into a commercial entertainment and represented an extreme conflation of sport and drama. Using records of All-in wrestling in the Mass Observation Archive, this paper explores the ways in which audiences negotiated the tensions between sport and spectacle.

Geoffrey Gorer and Féral Benga, a Collaboration

We now expect that an anthropologist's temperament and life experience, including personal and academic relationships with key informants, shape at least to a degree that person's scholarly interest and writing. Geoffrey Gorer and François (Féral) Benga, whose lives crosscut those of a number of leading intellectual and artistic figures of interwar Britain, France, and the USA, offer one example of how ethnographic partnership may come to shape a corner or two of disciplinal history. In 1934, before Margaret Mead encouraged his anthropological career, Gorer toured West Africa with Benga who had come to France from Senegal to perform in the Folies Bergères. Gorer [(1935. Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knoft)] published an account of their travels as Africa Dances. This collaboration would shape Gorer's subsequent contributions to the broader contours of culture and personality theory and national character study before and after World War II.

Censorship and Magic Tricks in Inter-War Britain

This paper demonstrates that between World War One and World War Two, the British state censored a variety of media including books, magazines, postcards, and films as well as engaging in public trials of obscene books that generated enormous publicity. Despite all of this, the British state denied that it censored and was largely successful at concealing its own practices. This paper documents the ways that the British state concealed the mechanisms of censorship and considers why these strategies became necessary when in previous decades the state had censored as a matter of course.

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

Cradle to Grave: Municipal Medicine in Interwar England and Wales. By Alysa Levene, Martin Powell, John Stewart and Becky Taylor.

Cradle to Grave: Municipal Medicine in Interwar England and Wales. By Alysa Levene, Martin Powell, John Stewart and Becky Taylor.

Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain by Angus McLaren (review)

Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain by Angus McLaren (review)

ANGUS MCLAREN. Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain.

ANGUS MCLAREN. Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain.

A Bridge between Science and Art? The Artistic Reception of On Growth and Form in Interwar Britain, c. 1930–42

Taking Herbert Read’s 1942 review of the second edition of On Growth and Form as its starting point, this article explores the artistic response to the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson during the 1930s and early 1940s through the frame of the culture of popular science and the powerful current of interest that artists directed towards science at the time. The role of Thomson’s work as a bridge between natural science and art, occupying the middle ground between poetry, philosophy and science, is described. Its creative use-value to Modernist artists as a pioneering work of morphology is discussed.

‘Little prisoners of city streets’: London elementary schools and the School Journey Movement, 1918–1939

This article examines the experience of the ‘school journey’, an educational fieldtrip of a fortnight’s duration, as practised in London’s interwar elementary schools. Established historical debates over perceptions of the countryside in interwar Britain have previously failed to discuss the messages promoted in schools. This article demonstrates that an idyllic notion of the rural countryside often influenced school practice, but that there was little attempt to link this explicitly to a wider ideological message around national identity or patriotism. Although exposure to the countryside was seen as undoubtedly beneficial, school journeys were not uncritical of rural life. They also encompassed a much wider range of purposes, being an opportunity to study different industries and local heritage, or foster contact with local people. Furthermore, they provided an unequalled opportunity for increased supervision by teachers, and thus a valuable chance to counter the perceived moral ill-effects of a child’s usual working-class environment.

‘Come to Corby’: A Scottish Steel Town in the Heart of England

Cross-border migration to England is a long-established feature of the Scottish diaspora. In the twentieth century, that phenomenon was demonstrated most visibly and persistently in the Northamptonshire steel-making centre of Corby, which from the 1930s to the 1960s was transformed from an English village into an outpost of Scotland in the heart of the Midlands. The migration, which helped to reconfigure the industrial landscape of inter-war and post-war Britain, offers an insight into the social, economic and cultural repercussions of large-scale relocation within both the donor and host communities. The article explores the causes, immediate consequences and long-term legacies of Corby's Scottish influx.

Sex and Common-Sense: Maude Royden, Religion, and Modern Sexuality

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between religion, sexuality, and modernity through a study of the important yet neglected text Sex and Common-Sense (1921) by the celebrated Anglican feminist preacher, pacifist, and campaigner for women's ordination, Maude Royden (1876–1956). It argues for the ongoing vitality of religious constructions of sexual identity in interwar Britain and the deeply symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between Christian and secular (scientific) discourses during this period. Royden's engagement with the new sexological and psychological approaches to the self and sexuality is examined, as are her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality through a more compassionate, progressive reading of women's capacity for sexual pleasure, marriage reform, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality. The centrality of her High Church incarnational theology to an understanding of sex as sacramental is also assessed. The article proposes that histories of sexuality and histories of religion have hitherto worked with differing chronologies of secularization that have had interesting implications not only for the recognition of religion's continued influence in shaping mainstream British sexual morality but also for the uneven and multifarious readings of modernity itself.

Gradualist or Revolutionary Secularization? A Case Study of Religious Belonging in Inter-War Britain, 1918–1939

The timing of secularization in Britain remains a contested topic among historians and sociologists, some regarding it largely as a post-Second World War phenomenon (with the 1960s a critical decade), others viewing it as a more gradual process commencing in the Victorian era. The inter-war years (1918–1939) have been little studied in this context, notwithstanding a coincidence of social, economic, and political circumstances which might have been expected to trigger religious change. The extent of religious belonging during this period is reviewed, with reference to quantitative evidence, from two perspectives: churchgoing, and church membership and affiliation. Trends in church attendance are documented, including the demographic variables which shaped it and the effect of innovations such as Sunday cinema and Sunday radio broadcasts of religious services. A conjectural religious profile of the adult population of Britain, c. 1939 reveals that, while, relative to population, there was only marginal growth in professed irreligion and non-Christian faiths since c. 1914, there was accelerated decline in religious worship (notably in terms of regularity) and active affiliation to Protestant denominations. This shift to nominalism particularly impacted the historic Free Churches (the phenomenon had long existed in the Church of England). Examination of these two religious indicators for the inter-war years thus lends further support to the view that secularization in Britain is best seen as a progressive and protracted process.

Refuse and the 'Risk Society': The Political Ecology of Risk in Inter-war Britain.

This article responds to current critiques of Ulrich Beck's ‘risk society’ thesis by historians of science and medicine. Those who have engaged with the concept of risk society have been content to accept the fundamental categories of Beck's analysis. In contrast, we argue that Beck's risk society thesis underplays two key themes. First, the role of capitalist social relations as the driver of technological change and the transformation of everyday life; and second, the ways in which hegemonic discourses of risk can be appropriated and transformed by counter-hegemonic forces. In place of ‘risk society’, we propose an approach based upon a ‘political ecology of risk’, which emphasises the social relations that are fundamental to the everyday politics of environmental health.

Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain, by Angus McLaren.

<i>Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain</i>, by Angus McLaren.

Co-operation and the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar England

Economic historians have recently taught us a great deal about the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar Britain. However, the story has largely been told from the supply side and the Co-operative movement that played a key role in the lives of millions of working-class consumers has tended to be marginalised. This article brings the movement and the consumer centre stage. First, the uneven and vulnerable situation of the Co-op as a business is outlined. The next section briefly sketches economic and political attacks on the movement that made it more difficult to respond effectively to the challenges it faced. The major part of the article discusses oral evidence from ordinary co-operative members, which helps illuminate the contradictory pressures faced by consumers in this period.